Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die

INTRODUCTION

Christ and the Concentration Camps

The most important question of the twenty-first century is: Why did Jesus
Christ come and die? To see this importance we must look beyond human causes.
The ultimate answer to the question, Who killed Jesus? is: God did. It is a
staggering thought. Jesus was his Son! But the whole message of the Bible leads
to this conclusion.

God Meant It for Good

The Hebrew prophet Isaiah, centuries before Christ, said, “It was the will
of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief” (Isaiah 53:10). The Christian
New Testament says, “[God] did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us
all” (Romans 8:32). “God put [Christ] forward . . . by his blood, to be received
by faith” (Romans 3:25).

But how does this divine act relate to the horribly sinful actions of the
men who killed Jesus? The answer given in the Bible is expressed in an early
prayer: “There were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus . . .
both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel,
to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place” (Acts
4:27-28). The scope of this divine sovereignty takes our breath away. But it
is also the key to our salvation. God planned it, and by the means of wicked
men, he accomplished it. To paraphrase a word from the Jewish Torah: They meant
it for evil, but God meant it for good (Genesis 50:20).

And since God meant it for good, we must look beyond human causes to the
divine purpose. The central issue of Jesus’ death is not the cause, but the
purpose—the meaning. Human beings may have their reasons for wanting Jesus out
of the way. But only God can design it for the good of the world. In fact, God’s
purposes for the world in the death of Jesus are unfathomable. I will try to
describe fifty of them, but there will always be more to say. My aim is to let
the Bible speak. This is where we hear the word of God. I hope that these pointers
will set you on a quest to know more and more of God’s great design in the death
of his Son.

Jesus’ Death Was Absolutely Unique

Why was the death of Jesus so powerful? He was convicted and condemned as
a pretender to the throne of Rome. But in the next three centuries his death
unleashed a power to suffer and to love that transformed the Roman Empire, and
to this day is shaping the world. The answer is that the death of Jesus was
absolutely unique. And his resurrection from the dead three days later was an
act of God to vindicate what his death achieved.

His death was unique because he was more than a mere human. Not less. He
was, as the ancient Nicene Creed says, “very God of very God.” This is the testimony
of those who knew him and were inspired by him to explain who he is. The apostle
John referred to Christ as “the Word” and wrote, “In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh
and dwelt among us” (John 1:1-2, 14).

Moreover he was utterly innocent in his suffering. Not just innocent of the
charge of blasphemy, but of all sin. One of his closest disciples said, “He
committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth” (1 Peter 2:22). Add
to this the fact that he embraced his own death with absolute authority. One
of the most stunning statements Jesus ever made was about his own death and
resurrection: “I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes
it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down,
and I have authority to take it up again” (John 10:17-18). The controversy about
which humans killed Jesus is marginal. He chose to die. His heavenly Father
ordained it. He embraced it.

The Purpose of His Death Was Vindicated by the Resurrection

God raised Jesus from the dead to show that he was in the right and to vindicate
all his claims. It happened three days later. Early Sunday morning he rose from
the dead. He appeared numerous times to his disciples for forty days before
his ascension to heaven (Acts 1:3).

The disciples were slow to believe that it really happened. They were not
gullible. They were down-to-earth tradesmen. They knew people did not rise from
the dead. At one point Jesus insisted on eating fish to prove to them that he
was not a ghost (Luke 24:39-43). This was not the resuscitation of a corpse.
It was the resurrection of the God-man into an indestructible new life. The
early church acclaimed him Lord of heaven and earth. Jesus had finished the
work God gave him to do, and the resurrection was the proof that God was satisfied.
This book is about what Jesus’ death accomplished for the world.

The Death of Christ and the Camps of Death

It is a tragedy that the story of Christ’s death has produced anti-Semitism
against Jews and crusading violence against Muslims. We Christians are ashamed
of many of our ancestors who did not act in the spirit of Christ. No doubt there
are traces of this plague in our own souls. But true Christianity—which is radically
different from Western culture, and may not be found in many Christian churches—renounces
the advance of religion by means of violence. “My kingdom is not of this world,”
Jesus said. “If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting”
(John 18:36). The way of the cross is the way of suffering. Christians are called
to die, not kill, in order to show the world how they are loved by Christ.

True Christian love humbly and boldly commends Christ, no matter what it
costs, to all peoples as the only saving way to God. Jesus said, “I am the way,
and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John
14:6). But let it be crystal-clear: To humiliate or scorn or despise or persecute
with prideful putdowns or pogroms or crusades or concentration camps is not
Christian. These were and are, very simply and horribly, disobedience to Jesus
Christ. Unlike many of his so-called followers after him, he prayed from the
cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

The death of Jesus Christ is the most important event in history, and the
most explosive political and personal issue of the twenty-first century. The
denial that Christ was crucified is like the denial of the Holocaust. For some
it’s simply too horrific to affirm. For others it’s an elaborate conspiracy
to coerce religious sympathy. But the deniers live in a historical dreamworld.
Jesus Christ suffered unspeakably and died. So did Jews.

I am not the first to link Calvary and the concentration camps—the suffering
of Jesus Christ and the suffering of Jewish people. In his heart-wrenching,
innocence-shattering, mouth-shutting book Night, Elie Wiesel tells of his experience
as a teenager with his father in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Buna,
and Buchenwald. There was always the threat of “the selection”—the taking away
of the weak to be killed and burned in the ovens.

At one point—and only one—Wiesel links Calvary and the camps. He tells of
an old rabbi, Akiba Dumer.

Akiba Dumer left us, a victim of the selection. Lately, he had wandered
among us, his eyes glazed, telling everyone of his weakness: “I can’t go
on. . . . It’s all over. . . .” It was impossible to raise his morale. He
didn’t listen to what we told him. He could only repeat that all was over
for him, that he could no longer keep up the struggle, that he had no strength
left, nor faith. Suddenly his eyes would become blank, nothing but two open
wounds, two pits of terror.1

Then Wiesel makes this provocative comment: “Poor Akiba Dumer, if he could
have gone on believing in God, if he could have seen a proof of God in this
Calvary, he would not have been taken by the selection.”2 I will not presume
to put any words in Elie Wiesel’s mouth. I am not sure what he meant. But it
presses the question: Why the link between Calvary—the place where Jesus died—and
the concentration camp?

When I ask this question, I am not thinking of cause or blame. I am thinking
of meaning and hope. Is there a way that Jewish suffering may find, not its
cause, but its final meaning in the suffering of Jesus Christ? Is it possible
to think, not of Christ’s death leading to Auschwitz, but of Auschwitz leading
to an understanding of Christ’s death? Is the link between Calvary and the camps
a link of unfathomable empathy? Perhaps only Jesus, in the end, can know what
happened during the “one long night”3 of Jewish suffering. And perhaps a generation
of Jewish people, whose grandparents endured their own noxious crucifixion,
will be able, as no others, to grasp what happened to the Son of God at Calvary.
I leave it as a question. I do not know.

But this I know: Those alleged “Christians” who built the camps never knew
the love that moved Jesus Christ toward Calvary. They never knew the Christ
who, instead of killing to save a culture, died to save the world. But there
are some Christians—the true Christians—who have seen the meaning of the death
of Jesus Christ and have been broken and humbled by his suffering. Could it
be that these, perhaps better than many, might be able to see and at least begin
to fathom the suffering of Jewish people?

What an irony that Christians have been anti-Semitic! Jesus and all his early
followers were Jews. People from every group in Palestine were involved in his
crucifixion (not just Jews), and people from every group attempted to stop it
(including Jews). God himself was the chief Actor in the death of his Son, so
that the main question is not, “Which humans brought about the death of Jesus?”
but “What did the death of Jesus bring about for humans—including Jews and Muslims
and Buddhists and Hindus and nonreligious secularists—and all people everywhere?”

When all is said and done, the most crucial question is: Why? Why did Jesus
come to die? Not why in the sense of cause, but why in the sense of purpose.
What did Christ achieve by his death? Why did he have to suffer so much? What
great thing was happening on Calvary for the world? That’s what the rest of
this book is about. I have gathered from the New Testament fifty reasons why
Jesus came to die. Not fifty causes, but fifty purposes. Infinitely more important
than who killed Jesus is the question: What did God achieve for sinners like
us in sending his Son to die?